Goldsboro Milling Company Turkey Hatchery Investigation

Cruelty Exposed at Goldsboro Milling Company Turkey Hatchery

In June and July of 2006, a COK investigator was employed for nearly three weeks at a North Carolina turkey hatchery that now supplies Butterball. While there, he witnessed and documented the misery endured by newly-hatched chicks as they began their short lives in the turkey industry.

As the investigation video shows, from the moment they’re hatched, these turkeys are submerged into a world of misery. Dumped out of metal trays and jostled onto conveyor belts after being mechanically separated from cracked egg shells, the newly-hatched turkeys are tossed around like inanimate objects—they are sorted, sexed, de-beaked, de-toed, and in some cases de-snooded. The video further reveals that not all chicks survive this harsh process. Countless chicks become mangled from the machinery, suffocated in plastic bags, or deemed “surplus” and dumped (along with injured chicks) into the same disposal system as the discarded egg shells they were separated from hours earlier. Those who survived the rough handling of the hatchery processing were packed up shipped off to “grow out” confinement facilities where most of them will never set foot outside.

Turkeys are typically slaughtered for food when they are just 4 to 5 months old, meaning that the birds filmed during COK’s investigation in June and July were being raised for Thanksgiving dinner tables.